Mystery Hunt 2011

Mystery Hunt 2011 is over... well, it's been over for days now. Time for a report of some sort.

Almost all of Beginner's Luck came back this year under the new name Luck Luck Goose. We lost our MIT connections, who were replaced by new ones. We also picked up a few more friends and good constructors (ultimately with 30 members attending including several remote solvers) to help ease the load should we win again. That was not to be, but congrats to Codex who was overdue for a win! We did manage to solve all meta-metas and complete the runaround nearly 10 hours after Codex, after HQ was no longer taking answers, but early enough that they let us start it. The Team Your Team Could Smell Like solved their last meta-meta only minutes before us, but ended up with a larger head start in the runaround due to technical difficulties in getting the skype part of the runaround set up for us.

We had our old headquarters from two years ago in Building 4, mostly in the same condition we left it save for a long coat rack running the length of the back of the room which interfered with our use of the space for Dart's STATUS system for answer tracking. We compromised, using the space above the rack for STATUS and the space below for hanging coats, etc., and making multiple columns of puzzles for each world in whatever way made sense.

Our first pleasant surprise was that MIT did away with that terrible 15 minute wait upon signing up for guest internet access and just let everybody connect. Then when Hunt began, the surprise of the theme was not so much of one for us, due to projectyl 's suggestion a day before the hunt that the wedding of M and P was Mario and Peach (link to opening skit video). I had followed that with a suggestion that Mario's multiple "worlds" would take us into the realms of other video games, also spot on. Video games had been considered as a theme before in my past construction years but we did not have a good story or structure to support it. And Plant Fungus hit it spot on.

There were even more surprises. The point system with time-based additions of points which we used last year for our time-based Hunt was still there, but scaled differently. We laughed when our points went into scientific notation. And something we really wanted to do last year, but had nowhere near the time to implement it, a lack of expertise in the existing software, and no good idea on how to balance it to avoid answer spamming, was to allow users to enter answers along with their answer check request. The way they kept the callback for verification was the perfect balance, and I expect to see this used for years to come.

The last surprise came at the end, when the answers were posted by wrapup. 

The puzzles were not without flaws, but by and large they were good. The first round, as befits a first round, was quite easy. We solved its final meta very quickly, but reports I've read show at least two teams beat us in doing so.

• I started in on Mario Clash, which was one of the clunkers in this round, and we saw the stereogram RGB quickly, but then we spent a while on various forms of analysis based on splitting the data into separate RGB channels and analyzing them separately, when we actually needed to keep the data together and only split the channels as x,y,z coordinates at the end when we plotted it.
• I set Clash aside (to be backsolved later) once we had solved the first meta, and I helped two of our new members with Another Small Collection of Immense Integers, pointing out how none of the prime factors were larger than 89 but there were surprisingly many 83s and 89s in the data. This was enough to get them going.
• Then I picked up Worthy of Picasso with ertchin , and we solved the paint-by-numbers part with ease once I figured out how the bars were meant to work. Some others joined us in cutting out the pieces and we found them much too small to work with; I made full-page versions of the individual pieces which folded into reasonably sized versions of the blocks, and after a bit of work one of us got the assembly to work. We transcribed the letters from the outside of the resulting cube and fairly quickly found how to read them.
• I also worked on Mountain Pass at some point, but I think it was much later when we were trying to fill in holes.

By the time we solved Picasso, I believe that all the world 1 metas were solved and we had world 2 open. And we slowed down considerably here. In no particular order, in this round I worked on:

• We had Funny Farm up on the projector almost immediately, but it stopped working, and seemed to be taking the whole Hunt site down, so unfortunately it had to be pulled before we could get very far.
• The Eternal Struggle: rpipuzzleguy  had made a Python program to brute-force this one from the starting conditions. It took a while to run, but we could move on to other things while it was running. I suggested that there might be additional ways to prune the search to get the answer faster, but he figured we had so many puzzles open it was better to just let what we had run.
• I looked at the packet of stuff from Redundant Obsolescence and reported to my team that out of the items, the only ones I could possibly read were the 5.25" floppy and the microcassette, and I was not positive I had working equipment for either, and it was a long drive away. Mike Booth developed the film at Ritz Photo in the Cambridgeside Galleria, while Martin took the rest of the stuff to the house of a friend who had equipment to read most of them, but it needed to be extracted out of storage and sometimes assembled to read the things. I think with 3 of the pieces solved we got the answer.
• Powder Monkey: Well, I looked at it, but it was not clear we were meant to identify these things primarily by taste, and I recommended doing more research on Thermo Fisher's web site to find whatever data about the various powders was available that might distinguish them with simple tests. We never really made progress here besides getting the phrase from the initials and evenutally backsolved it.
• Scrambling Attributes Yields Conundrum: After finding last year that we had no bridge-knowledgeable test solvers available for the meta I helped construct based on bridge, the 1710 meta was changed to not depend on bridge knowledge. So when a puzzle came up this year that looked like it depended on bridge knowledge, I jumped on it, with Mike Booth helping. In our first attempt we assumed the suits and cards in each suit were in order, since this did not immediately make any contradictions except the 1C opening on a holding of 4 diamonds and 4 clubs that should really have been a 1D opening, but upon looking at the resulting hands, the bids made no sense whatsoever. Upon realizing that the cards in each suit were sorted by the Greek alphabet, I realized this was wrong, and I needed to use bridge knowledge to figure out a mapping of cards that worked. I pretty quickly realized that this was going to mean I could only resolve the jack through ace, and correctly assumed that the result would depend on the point counts in each hand. I mainly worked on the notrump bids to resolve the card values, and with those done and partial info on the suits just based on what was higher than what, I had it limited to the queen of hearts and the queen of spades and called in both.
• Magnitude: I worked with a few other people on this one, saw that some of the numbers could only be estimated rather than known precisely, and saw the partially scrambled acrostic which I only partially solved before leaving this in the hands of others.
• You Shall Understand What Hath Befallen: rpipuzzleguy  wrote a Python program to work on this, just brute-forcing from the starting configuration without going outside the played area for each one, but he had made some errors of a type I learned hard years ago: that lists and similar objects are passed by reference, so you need to be careful how you handle them when passing them around. I helped him debug it and he got it going, but the puzzle was backsolved at about the same time.
• Rocky Horror: I looked at this after a first group had determined the names of the moves, but it seemed that some additional work was needed to understand where the clockwise counting was supposed to begun, and even then it wasn't clear to me what to do. I moved on.
• Pointillisme: I spent quite a while here solving the various paint-by-numbers and it seemed to me like they were video game sprites, but did not exactly match pictures I could find for the video games they seemed to be. My team had identified that some of the pictures were in France but had not identified specific locations, and we never realized that there was public video-game art there.

Eventually we had world 3 open also, and this was another slog.

• Build Your Own Acrostic: sin_vraal , canadianpuzzler , Martin and I worked on this one. Once we had solved most of the clues quickly (a couple of them not correctly, as it later turned out) we cut out all the little pieces and fit them together with a combination of jigsaw fitting and word building. Martin had been up far too long at this point and was making silly errors trying to call out the letters we had written for the clue answers, and sin_vraal  jokingly accused him of sabotaging the effort, but we got it solved.
• I looked at Counting the Ways, but we never figured out the concept.
• I looked at The Light World, but I found it too hard to concentrate on solving this one, and Corey did most of the work. The Fellowship answers were eventually all backsolved (except for WEBISMS on Counting the Ways, corresponding to Samwise, for which we called in all three of the possible answers on our biggest word list without finding it). For this puzzle that gave us GRANOLA which agreed with letters we were getting in the blue plane, except for the center cell which we knew was bad by not coming out to a multiple of 1/26. But we never understood the ordering, and as a result of this and the error we never got PROGINOSKES which was simply impossible with a letter missing and not understanding the order.
• The Crypt: I got the main concept here that all five strings were encipherments of the same plaintext, with some letters being represented by missing spaces in each key. With some help primarily from Martin I rebuilt one full cryptogram of the message and this was solved, and I was also the one to come up with the answer to that message. Then we spent a long time analyzing the missing letters in various ways, but never the right one, so we never got the other answers.
• Ganon meta: When we got the blocks I very quickly assembled them into a large tetrahedron, without regard to the letters, to help everybody see what we were going to build, and it was pretty obvious to all that we were going to spell three nine-letter meta answers on three faces and find the final meta answer on the fourth face. But we only had one meta answer until Sunday morning when we used out free answer for an extra Holiness answer and then projectyl solved it, surprising us all since after REGAL RING we thought they were all going to be Zelda items. But with that wrong assumption removed we got the remaining meta quickly also, and most of us present, led by Dart, helped to assemble the final tetrahedron.

After working on The Crypt to the first answer, it was 1 PM Saturday and we had not yet built anything for the machine event, though I had brought in the Beginner's Luck "spaceship" from 2009's Zyzzlvaria Hunt along with the rest of the Erector set which was a large component of it, and various mousetraps, wooden sticks, etc. that were also leftovers from that ship. We figured out how to set up a mousetrap with the flag attached to the bar so that triggering the trap would raise the flag, and then we positioned it so that the moveable arm on the front of the ship (which was originally designed so that it would be pushed upright to turn on the light switch by running the ship into the wall) could instead start upright and be flung backward into the trap. Then we weren't sure how we were going to do most of the other tasks, but I assembled the Erector motor (which went unused in 2009; this year it was the RC car motor that went unused) and we figured it could pull a string or belt to do most of the tasks. The second task was revealed to be sharpening a pencil. We ended up tying a string to the mousetrap bar to turn on the motor, and using a belt to turn the pencil whose end was forced against Martin's Leatherman. This very slowly ground away at the "point" end, and even though they weren't sure whether this pencil would ever get writably sharp before the batteries ran down, it was clearly in the process of sharpening the pencil so we got full coins for the tasks and 5 more for 5-10 energy transfers.

In the Civilization round:

• Some of my teammates got most of Showcase, but were confused on the first one (not seeing how any of them fit the description) and unsure of the third one. The last six spelled ANGLED and seemed good. I went back to the showcase (conveniently only one building away from our headquarters in building 4) with one of this group and looked over all the cases. After looking at them all, quietly (since another team was there) I suggested that it might be one of the two Riemann surfaces and that he should research those. While not up enough on Riemann surfaces to be sure about this, I did know enough to identify that as a likely candidate.
• Dart and I took a board, a bag of tiles, and the Racking Your Brains puzzle and went into our sleeping/food/breakout room which had tables large enough for the board, and we played through the game with only a little difficulty (most of it in placing the word that formed two other words). When I placed this word correctly, followed by restoring the few other words after it that needed to be moved, I saw how it spelled TRIPLE LETTERS, and then Dart saw the whole crazy message in all of the across words. We wrote out all the letters on triple letter spaces but did not immediately see how to read the answer off them. Word had passed back into the main room via Skype that we had built the board, and dalryaug  came over and quickly read off the answer.
• Many of us looked at Letter Bank, and while we had the idea that we might add letters to the given ones adding up to the given dollar amount in the intended way, nobody figured out that the words could mean the same thing as the short words given, so we never got anywhere on it. It was eventually backsolved.
• Advanced Maths was also looked at by many. We saw that the exponentiation seemed to work normally, and some of them seemed to work modulo certain numbers but since the answer was not always the smallest number that worked, we were still left with an incomplete description of the rules for the operations. We never solved it.
• I worked with rpipuzzleguy  and others on Cheaters Never Prosper, but really only for the initial extraction of names, sports, and infractions from the video.
• We sent somebody (I forget who) to Harvard for The Doors of Cambridge, and collected the data he found. At one point we had spelled out _ A _ _ O _ _ _ C _ _ A _ and somebody speculated that this spelled NAME OF ARCHWAY and asked for the name of the archway seen in the first photo, but before this was ever found we had letters that disconfirmed the answer.
• I worked with dalryaug , Wes, and jedusor  on Sufficiently Advanced Technology. We eventually identified all the cards but we never made the aha needed to get from there to the answer.
• I joined in with the group working on Part of Speech just as they were getting their 5th solve, and applied the diagonal line from the flavor text to get the answer.
• I worked with zebraboy3 , canadianpuzzler , and others on Laureate but I got called away to work on something else before it was finished.
• I had the correct idea on the Granary of Ur, but after calling in the few one-word answers we found that fit the letters we had, and even joking that THE FED worked, we didn't call it in. Much later this was indeed called in.
• I worked on solving the chess puzzle for Palace of Versailles together with coreyplover , and together we found the correct candidates for the first two moves, but eventually this was put into a chess program for the complete solve. It was much later before somebody figured out how to read the answer out of it, though.
• I gathered the names and tried the obvious extraction for the St. Andrew's Links puzzle, but it was not until dalryaug  came up with the birdie/bogey idea later that we finally solved it.
• I was part of a group Sunday morning that helped correct mistakes in the spreadsheet other teammates had made for Wall Street.

And for the spaceship that we had to build to enter round 5, wwe used the one we already had built for Zyzzlvaria two years ago and refit for the event earlier this Hunt. The pencil, Leatherman, and flag had been removed (the last because it was Martin's nametag) but it was still obvious that we were recycling, so when they came to judge it, I ad libbed some talk about how we were a green team that believed in recycling, and that this very ship served us well navigating Zyzzlvaria so we figured it was good enough for this one. If they had given us specs I would have gladly worked toward them, but as it was, we were just told we needed a spaceship. I imagine they might have been tougher on us if there were not two teams far ahead of us at this point.

Finally, after the spaceship bit, we got into the Katamari world at the point Sunday morning when I needed to rest a bit before I would be able to solve any puzzles, and there were a zillion puzzles open. I printed puzzles for people requesting them but did not work on puzzles much for a while. The first solve I remember was DALEK I LOVE YOU which sin_vraal  pointed out contained KILO, and due to this astute and correct observation, we were on the right track for all three metas early on.

• At some point when it was light out, Mapmaker made the katamari for the scavenger hunt Charitable Collection. I helped solve the quickie puzzle we got as a reward, and it was very shortly after this that I solved the small meta. People had guessed hours earlier that it was indexing by orders of magnitude, but they wanted to index from the ends of the words because it provided better letters or because of the negative magnitudes. But now having the first letter I was able to quickly pull ROSEBUD out of it.
• Charges was a big group solve through the spreadsheet, so I am not even sure who all was working on it. Some of our remote solvers, surely. I solved 3 or 4 of the answers, as one of the few solving efforts I made the first couple hours we had this round open.
• I had the right idea about Efficiency, that there were race conditions between the threads, but I was too tired at the time to try to puzzle it out, and I left it to CS types who showed up later.
• I was part of the group working on Payroll when somebody discovered how the answers could be formed phonetically from groups of letters - if you included Greek and Hebrew letters. Then we scrambled to assemble the correct answers and phonetic letters for the answers. Eventually Dart worked on filling the grid on paper, but left to go to the zombie event, and I looked at his paper while he was gone and read off the mostly-assembled clue phrase JAZ DRIVE MAKER.
• rpipuzzleguy  was all gung-ho about doing Walkthrough and I went with him and a 3rd person I forget (because it happened at 4 AM) to Kresge, but we saw it was a stretch to make those directions work and it got increasingly unlikely as we went on, especially all the talking with specific people. We never figured out how this actually worked, though we should have with all those [citation needed] and similar signs all over campus.
• I did the initial conversion of The Path More Stumbled back into the words it wanted to be, and somebody suggested the correct mechanism for the answer extraction, which I did for the first three letters and then I was too tired to do more. Somebody finished it later.
• I worked with Mike Booth on Clues and Coordinates, and Mapmaker also made us a paper model of the shape and an unfolded version to write the letters into, just before he worked on the scavenger hunt. We eventually solved it.
• I heard somebody say that there was a TMBG puzzle, and even though I had their shirt on, I was too tired to care. But it was Study Materials.
• A while after I got the first meta, one of our students solved the second one. It wasn't long after this, since I had already been collecting size data on our answers for the last 6 puzzles, that I came up with O B E _ _ N and called in OBERON to get us going on the runaround.

And yes, we went on the runaround. The first part was a video call in Skype, which neither we nor Plant Fungus were ready for, them because they weren't prepared for two teams to do it at the same time. The Team Your Team Could Smell Like started it just slightly before us, but ended up with a more sizable lead because of the delay getting started.

The skype puzzle consisted of us giving verbal commands to Mario to navigate a Portal-like puzzle without the benefit of a portal gun, and instead only using powers he had from the star we had assembled for him. Once we got him to a certain point where there was an outside door, he told us to meet him. It happened that this was just down the hall from our headquarters; as a result, we heard the noise earlier in the morning as other teams had come through here.

Then we went on a fairly short runaround where we found real-world counterparts for the meta answers. This runaround was also designed like a Portal puzzle which we had to solve without benefit of a portal gun, this time by breaking into two teams and using cell phones to communicate status. The end of this brought us together again, and we had to find the nerf sword in the room we entered. This was pointing upward, which we were nudged was a clue after we seemed to be stuck. I saw a ladder on the far side of the room and I said, "Get the ladder. Mario likes ladders," which seemed much funnier in my sleep-deprived state than it does now. We did so and found the empty question-mark box which is the result in Super Mario Brothers after somebody has already gone through and taken the coin from it.

There were no answer checks in this runaround. Some people will say "good riddance" to them. Only the answers to the 5 final metas were required in the runaround.